By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
I had been thinking about how this week’s mine accident that claimed 25 lives is just one more way the true cost of coal is being revealed.
Coal is only cheap if you fail to factor in the loss of life, the long-term human health effects, the environmental devastation both in the immediate area of coal mining, the regions near coal-fired plants and finally, to the Earth’s atmosphere. Do these costs need to be more far-reaching before we face these facts?
While I was thinking along these lines, Lester R. Brown’s column on just this point arrived. We’ve printed his book excerpt about how to tackle this problem of assigning reality-based costs to fossil fuels. In this piece, Brown, the founder of Earth Policy Institute, discusses how our lawmakers could stage in these real costs by taxing dirty fuels in much the same way we, finally, taxed cigarettes to take into account the horrible human toll of tobacco use.
Even today, the now fairly high cost of a pack of cigarettes doesn’t approach the even higher public health costs exacted by smoking. Coal taxes could not be expected to suddenly cover the full breach between today’s price and one that covers coal’s damage. But they could begin to address this inequity, and in the process the money raised could be used to lighten the tax burden for individuals. But I’ll let Brown explain more about the tax shifting policies that are already working elsewhere.
And if you’re thinking, well that sounds good, but what about our dependence on coal? We need the electricity. I agree, we surely do. Coal supplies nearly half of the electricity used in the U.S. That’s got to be taken into consideration. Americans aren’t ready to wake up tomorrow and turn the furnace off, or walk around in dark houses without TVs and working appliances.
But we’ve got to start the transition. Like a smoker, to beat that analogy into the ground, we’ve got to get a nicotine patch. We’ve got to get beyond coal, which is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gases worldwide.
Smoking comes to mind here because we still have an estimated 1,500 miners dying every year from Black Lung disease. In their case, though, this degenerative lung condition is an unavoidable occupational hazard.
Today a different story came out that raises some hope. The American Wind Energy Association reported that despite one of the worst economic downturns in decades, wind power continued to grow rapidly in 2009, with a robust diversification of the industry and workforce spreading across the nation. (Of course, some of the projects were running on plans put in place before the collapse.)
Wind now provides nearly 2 percent of Americans’ power, with other renewable energy sources (including solar, biomass, wood and geothermal power) supplying another 1.8 percent of the energy we use. The rest of our energy comes from hydropower (which can be characterized as clean, but not as much as wind and solar), natural gas, nuclear power and King Coal, which provides 45 percent of our energy needs.
What can an individual do to help change the mix, to push it toward renewables? Two things come to mind. You can check your power provider and see if they have a clean energy option, or switch to a clean energy power provider. Options are growing almost daily, and chances are that the costs and choices have improved since you last checked.
Make that three things: You can also consider reducing your own consumption with on-site wind or solar power, or through efficiency measures.
Finally, if you want to advocate for clean energy, let your elected officials know you support a federal Renewable Electricity Standard. A RES is under consideration as part of the energy bill pending in the U.S. Senate. It would mandate that the nation derive a certain percentage of its power from clean, renewable sources like wind and solar and geothermal facilities. The numbers haven’t been finalized yet; climate/energy legislation that passed the house targeted 20 percent renewable energy by 2020. Some argue that interim goals need to be set, like reaching 10 percent renewables by 2012 (which would not include hydropower). But let’s not get lost in the details here.
A RES sends a signal to industry, financiers, governments, educators and the world. It would keep America in the hunt for clean tech, and clear the path to the future. Instead of marking time until the next coal tragedy, the next mountain top laceration, the next alert that greenhouse gases are rising, we’d be moving in a positive direction.
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